THE CAMPAIGN FIR.EWOR.KS? T he crowd in Cincinnati last Tuesday was enthusiastic but minuscule by Presidential-campaign standards. There were perhaps a thousand people gathered in a corner of a vast parking lot, most of them students or trade-union members. They waited through rain showers and then cheered on cue, waving identical blue "Gore 2000" placards, as a yellow school bus rolled up and disgorged the Democratic Party's candidates for Pres- ident and Vice-President, who seem to have travelled in every possible means of conveyance but missile and hot-air bal- loon thIs past month. Despite his recent triumphs, Al Gore is still uncomfortable on the stump. Mter his brisk, conversational Conven- tion speech, he has returned to his lugu- brious and, at times, condescending norm. Gore's speech in Cincinnati was a listless recitation of policy nostrums, building toward a flaccid peroration: "I want to ask for one thing more," he said, although he hadn't asked the crowd for anything interesting, only their votes. "I want you to open your hearts and be- lieve, genuinely, that we can do the right thing in this country." Fireworks fol- lowed, improbably. (As it happened, the performance was being filmed for a Gore campaign commercial.) Gore doesn't have to do much more than show up these days. This Presiden- tial campaign is in the process of being lost, not won. Indeed, Gore would have been foolish to make news in Cincin- nati: George W. Bush was ensnared in yet another silly crisis, fending off in- quiries about one of his campaign ads, an attack on Gore's prescription-drug proposal for senior citizens, in which the d " " ( . " b " ) d wor rats as In ureaucrats seeme to flash subliminally. This was probably more of a prank by Alex Castellanos, who produced the ad and is known for his combativeness, than a nefarious ef- fort to brainwash voters, but its puerility reinforced the not altogether subliminal message that George W. Bush is a less than serious candidate. There has been a Freudian quality to the recent Bush bungles. Both the "rats" controversy and Bush's inadvertent open- mike derogation of a reporter (as a "major- league asshole") are niggling non-events, but they seem almost too perfectly feck- less to be unintentional-emanations from a former fraternity president's sub- conscious, perhaps, or the work of some cosmic political consultant intent on broadcasting Bush's alleged gravitational deficiencies to the widest possible audi- ence at the worst possible time. Two weeks in a row as the subject of Leno and Let- terman monologues! There is no prece- dent for this in a general-election cam- paign. There may be no recovery from it, either, without a violent "lurch" in the campaign dynamic. It isn't easy to manufacture a lurch in a quiet political season, but the Gore . " "..,:t,,: h" '. "', r; , 1 -''',1. '. ( 'i-... \ .. " , ' {\ , "ì \ · ,''} ( .\ .,. ,. ,. \ , \ ) f\t II l' ^ > ;- -{ ' \\ ,.,:'\;. ,JI: ./! · " · -, A l , " · · \ ,j t , \ /, , ", " , '.\. \ " .) . . it finance squalor: another JustIce Depart- ment investigation, this one exploring Gore's alleged 1995 effort to dun trial lawyers as a quid pro quo for the Clin- ton Administration's opposition to tort- reform legislation. Once again, Gore's behavior probably skimmed the out- skirts of acceptable practice, but there is a blithe hypocrisy to his antic buckraking while belatedly calling for campaign- finance reform. During the Republican primaries last winter, Senator John McCain insisted that campaign-finance abuse was the portal through which an attack could be launched against the larger ethical ques- tions raised by the Clinton Presidenc)T. "When I'm in a debate with A1 Gore, I'm going to . . . say, 'You and Bill Clin- ton debased the institutions of govern- ment . . . and then you said there was "no controlling legal authority," , " Mc- Cain argued in a New Hampshire pri- mary debate against Bush. "George, when you're in that debate, you're going to stand there and you'll have nothing to say; because you're defending the system." \r -/ r , I' , . t L ast week, McCain was back-ban- daged, after cancer surgery, but still unbowed-and seething, in charge of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the entertainment industry's market- ing practices. Joe Lieberman made an appearance, testifying against the indus- try, but he wasn't asked to defend the Gore campaign's pursuit of Hollywood money. (In fact, McCain was photo- graphed embracing Lieberman.) It was left to Lynne Cheney; the wife of the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, to make the case against the Democrats. A more supple Republican campaign might have sent its nominee to Wash- ington to throttle the entertainment in- dustry and the Democrats, and, perhaps, to force Gore onto the defensive. But George W. Bush spent the day wander- ing the Pacific Northwest-he was pho- tographed by the Times standing in a fog-lamenting the plight of the salmon and the condition of the national parks. "Under this Administration, the parks are in worse shape than ever before," he announced, reading from a teleprompter in the midst of the wilderness. -Joe Klein 1= ::::::; co >- e:::: e:::: <C co campaign offered a fat, if unexploited, target last week. There was a vampiric duality to Gore's schedule. By day, he was the picture of worthiness-the theme of the week was education, and he was a constant presence in public- school classrooms. By night, though, Gore sluiced new blood into his campaign treasury through a series of million- dollar fund-raising concerts in Boston, New York, and Camden, New Jersey. The entertainment for these events was organized by the same sort of executives that Gore and his running mate, Joseph Lieberman, had attacked a few days ear- lier for promoting "R -rated" movies to underage audiences. And there was addi- tional news of Clinton-Gore campaign- 36 THE NEW YORKER, 5EPTEMBER 25, 2000